This dissertation offers the first monograph-length exploration of South Korean popular folk—or p'ok'ŭ— music in English. P'ok'ŭ was tied initially to “youth culture” (ch'ŏngnyŏnmunhwa), which refers to the Western-derived musical and leisure activities of university-educated youth, and later to the student movement (haksaengundong), which was quickly expanding after Park Chung Hee initiated the 1972 Yushin constitution that legitimized his de facto dictatorship. I argue that p'ok'ŭ was a genre shaped by censorship due to its popularity among university students, who were also the primary actors protesting Park’s escalating authoritarianism. I examine primary source newspaper reports that document p'ok'ŭ’s less politicized years between 1968 and 1973, when the media applauded its campus-bred amateurism, anti-commercialism, and originality of singer-songwriters, as well as its more politicized years between 1974 and 1975, when Park prohibited the media from reporting on campus demonstrations. I show how government censorship aided p'ok'ŭ singers between 1971 and 1972 when broadcast producers promoted it as the “wholesome” alternative to other banned genres, and illustrate how the infamous blacklisting of 1975 targeted hit p'ok'ŭ songs, framing them as evidence of youth’s blind embrace of “decadent” Western trends.

Media portrayals of p'ok'ŭ singers took a turn in 1974 because widespread dissidence spread from the student movement to youth culture. The movement’s nationalist ideology of “people’s democracy” (minjung juŭi), which aimed to draw from the oppressed people in building resistance, instilled in p'ok'ŭ singers a desire to create a Korean aesthetic that harnessed domestic—rather than Japanese or American—culture. I illustrate how p'ok'ŭ came to signify both the romantic sentiment of youth culture and the courageous resistance of the student movement, by analyzing the 1975 film The March of Fools, which depicts how university students navigated the contradictions of a regime that touted an efficient form of nationalist democracy while suppressing freedom of expression. I contend that in such a paradoxical and restrictive environment, p'ok'ŭ underwent a paradoxical and restricted evolution. The government’s blacklisting of over two hundred songs and the Marijuana Incident of December 1975, which stigmatized top p'ok'ŭ singers as marijuana-smoking criminals, brought about the downfall of p'ok'ŭ.